Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
Doesn’t this sound all too familiar?
You make plans with your spouse or your kids or your best friend you haven’t seen in years. It’s great, you’re just settling in for good conversation or an afternoon of peaceful fun and---------isn’t it inevitable?!—something comes up.
Take, for example, my daughter the actress. Out of the last four auditions she’s had that have led to actual roles, three have occurred when she’s been out of New York, and two of them were when she and her fiancé were up here on vacation. No question: they had to drop everything to rush back to the city.
The last time it happened, her fiancé had a meltdown and accused the universe of conspiring against them. It’s lucky she got the job!
In the Gospel the apostles are aching for Jesus-time. They’ve just returned from their first mission trip out on their own, and they’re bursting with stories about how this healing went and what that demon yelled on his way out, what worked and what didn’t work?
And Jesus wants to hear all the details.
So he invites them to a time apart—a retreat: “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.”
But—uh oh—people spot their boat and take a shortcut overland and a whole crowd of them is there to greet Jesus and the apostles when they come.
Remember Jesus is human—he’d wanted this time away with his friends as much as they had. Imagine now how his heart must have sunk when he saw the crowd on the shore, voracious for his care.
Yet he doesn’t order them to turn the boat around and head on out for another try farther on down the shore.
Because he’s realized that this is a great teaching moment. After all, these friends and students of his—Peter and Andrew, James and John, and the rest, are “apostles in training.” The word ‘apostle’ is from the Greek. Jesus was preparing his friends and students to be sent out into all the known world.
Jesus as a good teacher sees a way to be present with them and at the same time deepen their sense of what it means to be an apostle.
This may be interesting in a bible-study kind of way. But, you may be asking, what does this have to do with me?.
But consider the end of our Eucharist service. We’re not invited to stay here forever, until the next Eucharist, and so on and so on.
No. In the last prayer we say together, we pray, “Send us out into the world in peace.” And the very last liturgical words are mine: “Let us go forth into the world” and yours, “Thanks be to God.”
So we too are apostles in training. So we too need some basic lessons in apostleship, right along with Peter, James, John, Matthew, and the rest.
The first lesson of apostleship: We’re not living in a controlled environment. We’re living real lives in a real world. Circumstances can change on a dime, expectations get blown out of the water. And being an apostle means dealing with it, rather than yearning for something else. Means understand that this is where you and God have wound up. The places we’re sent are often surprising and often, alas, not at all what we ourselves would choose. And—and this is a wildly unfashionable thing to say—being an apostle often means sacrifice—including the sacrifice of one’s hopes and dreams in the long or short term to the circumstances God puts in front of us.
You may, for example, find yourself grappling with terrible health issues in your family. It is not what you expected, absolutely not what you wanted—but right now it is where you are called to be an apostle, to love and serve God and one another.
Second lesson of apostleship taught by Jesus as the boat heads into shore: Jesus looked at the rabble on the shore with compassion and saw not misfits and undesirables and people one would rather not know, but “sheep without a shepherd.” Being an apostle means getting your heart stretched. Pat L’Abbe and I learned that the first day we walked into the Offenders’ Program and felt our hearts tugged toward men who from the world’s point of view, were absolutely unlovable.
Finally, Jesus takes the apostles to another town, Gennesaret, for lesson #3.
Basically the same thing happens. More crowds, more sick, more “sheep without a shepherd.” So many that people beg just to touch the fringe of Jesus’ cloak.
The third lesson of apostleship lies here: our work is to make the “fringe of Jesus’ garment” available wherever we are.
You and I are called to be Christ-carriers, Christ-bearers. Wherever and whenever we are. It’s not we who console people, or give people new self-respect, or offer God’s care and concern through presence and prayer:
No. What happens is that people can look at us, talk to us, be with us, and through and in that relationship find access to Christ. We can become his healing presence for them, knowing all the time that it’s not we who are doing any of this.
Later, when we pray to be sent forth into the world after the Eucharist, let us say it with all the conviction and humility and trust in God we can muster, remembering the lessons of apostleship Jesus has taught us today:
--opportunities to carry Christ’s healing, loving presence occur in all of our lives, even in (or possibly especially in) those circumstances which surprise us, bushwack us, change all our carefully made plans;
--as apostles we are called to respond to these circumstances with hearts willing to be stretched by Christ’s compassion within us;
--we ask God’s mercy that we may live so that through us others can touch the “fringe of Jesus’ cloak.”
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
July 12, 2009
Sixth Sunday of Pentecost
July 12, 2009
Who ever said worship is boring? Today we’re invited to witness unadulterated, boisterous spiritual joy in the person of King David as he dances the Ark of the Covenant into his new capital city of Jerusalem.
Of course we’re not talking about a boat like Noah’s “ark.” The Ark of the Covenant, for those of you who haven’t seen “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” was a very large chest or trunk. It carried Israel’s greatest treasure, the two stone tablets inscribed with the ten commandments.
Remember that the Israelites at this point in their history were nomads, wandering the desert. So God ordered their craftspeople to build a portable shrine, large enough to hold the tablets, but small enough to be carried moved from place to place.
For nearly 40 years, the Ark with its precious cargo of the ten commandments led the people as they traveled through the desert on their way to the promised land.
Once the Israelites settled into Canaan/Palestine the Ark was placed in a position of honor in one of the main cities.
Many years later, the Philistines invaded Israel. They were eager to get their hands on the Ark because they believed it held the divine power of Yahweh, Israel’s God.
But the Israelites hid it away for 20 years until David defeated the Philistines (remember Goliath?) and was declared King of Israel.
David then took the Ark out of hiding and marched it in ceremonial procession to his new capital city, Jerusalem.
For the people of Israel, the Ark of the Covenant not only held the stone tablets but in some sense was the presence of God among them.
They had good reason for this. The ten commandments confirmed and expressed God’s unfailing care for the chosen people, what in Hebrew is called ‘heset,’ or “steadfast love” because they showed that God cared enough about them to give them rules for living.
So David’s dance that day in Jerusalem expressed pure spiritual joy at the coming of God’s presence into Jerusalem.
Or—maybe not.
There’s that peculiar little scene of Michal, one of David’s wives, observing from the palace window. As everyone else in Jerusalem was partying outside, his wife chose to stay inside and watch the spectacle from there: “Michal, daughter of Saul, looked out of the window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the LORD; and she despised him in her heart.”
What’s going on with her? Is she nursing a private grudge? Why can’t she share David’s spiritual fervor? Doesn’t she believe God’s presence is in the Ark of the Covenant?
When she looks out the window and sees David dancing, she doesn’t see joyous spirituality, David ecstatic in the presence of God. She sees a raw (and very effective) display of political power.
Michal is the daughter of the former king, Saul, whom God deposed in favor of David. For Michal, the Ark of the Covenant rolling into Jerusalem cemented David’s claim to the throne. Religious awe?—no way. Political cynicism—that’s all she could feel.
I see Michal as the patron saint of many people today.
People who love spirituality, but distrust religion.
How often have you heard someone say, “I like the teachings of Jesus Christ, but I just can’t bring myself to belong to a church.” And then they may go on to cite, as many recent books have done, sins of the churches over the two millennia since Jesus lived on earth
We all know the scandalous history of Christianity: Catholics murdering Protestants, Protestants murdering Catholics. Executions of so-called witches. Suppression, imprisonment, silencing, or even executions of the scientists of the Renaissance.
Many churches in the United States condoning slavery. Silencing and exclusion of women, people with handicaps, people of differing sexual orientations from worship and certainly from positions of authority. Churches in many nations supporting cruel and repressive regimes.
Even you, even I, may occasionally step back and look at Church from behind a curtain and think, “So what does God have to do with this?” It’s no accident that the fastest growing faith group in the United States right now is “spiritual but not religious.”
This past week and in the week ahead, you might feel a bit like Michal as the drama of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the USA unfolds.
You might think—all this wrangling, especially about sexuality, it’s just embarrassing.
You might feel like shouting, Church shouldn’t have anything to do with politics or social issues—why don’t we all just worship together? What does all this have to do with God and spirituality?
David’s fervor and Michal’s cynicism both have something to teach us about the reality of church.
Yes, God is present in our worship. God continues to love us with hesed, with steadfast love. Jesus Christ continues to show up in the Eucharist.
But Michal’s clear-eyed appreciation that religion and politics are thoroughly intertwined is also necessary. As soon as you get more than two people gathered together, Christ may be in the midst of them, but so will politics.
In any church, from CHS right up to national and international church bodies, the question is how do we do the necessary politics of the church?
In our vestry recently, we’ve been working hard practicing “spirit-filled listening,” in which we all try to respect the integrity of people we disagree with, and realizing that we individually may not have the truth nailed down. It’s really hard—we all love our own opinions and our own voices, but we’re working at it.
At General Convention this week, the House of Delegates declared an unprecedented one hour pause in Roberts Rules of Order for strangers in pairs to talk to one another about their personal histories around sexuality and spirituality, days before they will all vote on those issues.
A religious organization, a church, is people getting it wrong, struggling over and over to get it at least righter, returning to the well of both personal and communal spirituality, —to what David danced for that long ago day in Jerusalem—God’s unfailing, steadfast love.
July 12, 2009
Who ever said worship is boring? Today we’re invited to witness unadulterated, boisterous spiritual joy in the person of King David as he dances the Ark of the Covenant into his new capital city of Jerusalem.
Of course we’re not talking about a boat like Noah’s “ark.” The Ark of the Covenant, for those of you who haven’t seen “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” was a very large chest or trunk. It carried Israel’s greatest treasure, the two stone tablets inscribed with the ten commandments.
Remember that the Israelites at this point in their history were nomads, wandering the desert. So God ordered their craftspeople to build a portable shrine, large enough to hold the tablets, but small enough to be carried moved from place to place.
For nearly 40 years, the Ark with its precious cargo of the ten commandments led the people as they traveled through the desert on their way to the promised land.
Once the Israelites settled into Canaan/Palestine the Ark was placed in a position of honor in one of the main cities.
Many years later, the Philistines invaded Israel. They were eager to get their hands on the Ark because they believed it held the divine power of Yahweh, Israel’s God.
But the Israelites hid it away for 20 years until David defeated the Philistines (remember Goliath?) and was declared King of Israel.
David then took the Ark out of hiding and marched it in ceremonial procession to his new capital city, Jerusalem.
For the people of Israel, the Ark of the Covenant not only held the stone tablets but in some sense was the presence of God among them.
They had good reason for this. The ten commandments confirmed and expressed God’s unfailing care for the chosen people, what in Hebrew is called ‘heset,’ or “steadfast love” because they showed that God cared enough about them to give them rules for living.
So David’s dance that day in Jerusalem expressed pure spiritual joy at the coming of God’s presence into Jerusalem.
Or—maybe not.
There’s that peculiar little scene of Michal, one of David’s wives, observing from the palace window. As everyone else in Jerusalem was partying outside, his wife chose to stay inside and watch the spectacle from there: “Michal, daughter of Saul, looked out of the window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the LORD; and she despised him in her heart.”
What’s going on with her? Is she nursing a private grudge? Why can’t she share David’s spiritual fervor? Doesn’t she believe God’s presence is in the Ark of the Covenant?
When she looks out the window and sees David dancing, she doesn’t see joyous spirituality, David ecstatic in the presence of God. She sees a raw (and very effective) display of political power.
Michal is the daughter of the former king, Saul, whom God deposed in favor of David. For Michal, the Ark of the Covenant rolling into Jerusalem cemented David’s claim to the throne. Religious awe?—no way. Political cynicism—that’s all she could feel.
I see Michal as the patron saint of many people today.
People who love spirituality, but distrust religion.
How often have you heard someone say, “I like the teachings of Jesus Christ, but I just can’t bring myself to belong to a church.” And then they may go on to cite, as many recent books have done, sins of the churches over the two millennia since Jesus lived on earth
We all know the scandalous history of Christianity: Catholics murdering Protestants, Protestants murdering Catholics. Executions of so-called witches. Suppression, imprisonment, silencing, or even executions of the scientists of the Renaissance.
Many churches in the United States condoning slavery. Silencing and exclusion of women, people with handicaps, people of differing sexual orientations from worship and certainly from positions of authority. Churches in many nations supporting cruel and repressive regimes.
Even you, even I, may occasionally step back and look at Church from behind a curtain and think, “So what does God have to do with this?” It’s no accident that the fastest growing faith group in the United States right now is “spiritual but not religious.”
This past week and in the week ahead, you might feel a bit like Michal as the drama of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the USA unfolds.
You might think—all this wrangling, especially about sexuality, it’s just embarrassing.
You might feel like shouting, Church shouldn’t have anything to do with politics or social issues—why don’t we all just worship together? What does all this have to do with God and spirituality?
David’s fervor and Michal’s cynicism both have something to teach us about the reality of church.
Yes, God is present in our worship. God continues to love us with hesed, with steadfast love. Jesus Christ continues to show up in the Eucharist.
But Michal’s clear-eyed appreciation that religion and politics are thoroughly intertwined is also necessary. As soon as you get more than two people gathered together, Christ may be in the midst of them, but so will politics.
In any church, from CHS right up to national and international church bodies, the question is how do we do the necessary politics of the church?
In our vestry recently, we’ve been working hard practicing “spirit-filled listening,” in which we all try to respect the integrity of people we disagree with, and realizing that we individually may not have the truth nailed down. It’s really hard—we all love our own opinions and our own voices, but we’re working at it.
At General Convention this week, the House of Delegates declared an unprecedented one hour pause in Roberts Rules of Order for strangers in pairs to talk to one another about their personal histories around sexuality and spirituality, days before they will all vote on those issues.
A religious organization, a church, is people getting it wrong, struggling over and over to get it at least righter, returning to the well of both personal and communal spirituality, —to what David danced for that long ago day in Jerusalem—God’s unfailing, steadfast love.
July 5th, 2009
Proper 9
July 5th, 2009
Americans have always sung their faith.
From native American songs, drums, and flutes, through the harmonies of Anglican psalm singing at churches like Old North Church in Boston and Bruton Parish in Virginia, to Roman Catholic Gregorian chant in Spanish Florida and California; to the cries of lament and longings for freedom of African slaves; to the boisterous praise songs of camp meetings and revivals, Hebrew chant and now Hindu and Muslim and Buddhist sacred songs—Americans love to sing their prayers!
Today, mindful of this weekend’s celebration of our country, I want to look at four hymns as lenses to focus on some of the strands that have uniquely formed our spiritual lives as American Christians.
Processional: “The Spacious Firmament on High” Blue hymnal #409.
Not officially an “American” hymn. Joseph Addison was an English poet who never ventured across the Atlantic to the colonies. The poem itself, based on Psalm 19, was published in an English literary newspaper in 1712.
I chose it for this morning because it reveals an important strand of American spirituality in the English colonies and in the first years of kind United States. This strand—we still get this in New England—is a kind of “gentlemanly distance” from God.
Joseph Addison held a point of view very important to Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and other Founding Fathers.
They were “deists”—That means that they believed in God, yes, but not a personal God. In their minds, God was the “great clockmaker,” the creator who had set the world going, but then stepped back and let it work itself out according to laws of nature which were just being discovered by Isaac Newton and others.
This attitude was not un-religious nor un-spiritual. It expresses deep reverence and awe which comes from what one of my professor’s used to call “the size gap” between God and God’s world:
Let’s read aloud together the first verse. As you read the words, try and feel in your imagination the holy awe the writer felt toward the Creator of such a perfectly lawful and orderly uiniverse: . . . .
This “gentlemanly reserve” toward God was quite prevalent in colonial times and in the early days of the United States.
But the 19th century gave rise to two urgent and powerful movements towards a greater intimacy with God.
Gospel: “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” LEVAS 175
African slaves, pushed to desperation by captivity, cruelty, disruption of families, had nowhere or no one to turn to beside God. This was the God who had freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and that gave them hope.
But sometimes all they could do was lament: “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, Nobody knows but Jesus.”
There’s no size gap here, no, not at all-- no reverent distance,no philosophy or complicated theology—the slave is crying from his or her very bones to the only One who might possibly listen..
Offertory: “In the Garden” LEVAS 69
Meanwhile waves of religious fervor were burning through white communities in the United States during the 19th century in a series of what were called “Great Awakenings.” Women and men sang their hearts out at huge revivals.
The God of the revivals was not at all the distant and disinterested Clockmaker of the Revolutionary War period. On the contrary, God, especially in the person of Jesus, was vividly, emotionally present, saving them right there in the church or tent or open field, healing their bodies and forgiving their sins.
For many individuals the fervor of revivals eventually gave way to a quieter, but maybe even more intimate, sense of God or Jesus as a personal friend. These people felt perfectly comfortable talking with God and confidently asking for help..
“In the Garden,” written in 1912, expresses this radical sense of intimacy. Some of us may love this old hymn. And I suspect that others of us, it’s embarrassing, because it’s so off-the-charts sentimental.
And yet . . . , and yet . . . , isn’t there something gripping in the idea that you and I can walk, like Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection, with Jesus himself beside us? Anywhere? Any time? What if it’s really true that Jesus won’t put up any barriers between us.
I have just read a history of Alcoholics Anonymous which points out that this has been the favorite hymn of many recovered alcoholics over the years Why?. Because only such a sense of intimacy with Jesus/God/their “Higher Power” that allows alcoholics and other addicts to make the leap of faith and surrender their lives to a God who truly cares for them.
Let’s pray this hymn, saying verses one and two with the chorus, and while we’re speaking, imagine that we’re walking with Jesus in a July garden:
Recessional: “America the Beautiful” #719.
Written at the top of Pike’s Peak by a young woman professor from Wellesley College in 1893.
She’d just traveled west by train for the first time. She’s seen the “alabaster city” of Chicago all spruced up for the Columbian Exposition. She’d watched the “amber waves of grain” as the train crossed Kansas on the 4th of July.
On the top of Pike’s Peak, Katherine Lee Bates’s heart burst out in a prayer for her country. I love this hymn: it doesn’t express uncritical admiration nor a jingoistic thanksgiving for a perfect nation. Rather, Bates’ prays that her country’s physical beauty may be matched by moral and ethical beauty.
Each verse concludes with a prayer, one of which is repeated—“America! America! God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea,” and this, which deserves to be prayed before every deliberation of every governmental body in this nation: “America! America! God mend thine every flaw, confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.”
July 5th, 2009
Americans have always sung their faith.
From native American songs, drums, and flutes, through the harmonies of Anglican psalm singing at churches like Old North Church in Boston and Bruton Parish in Virginia, to Roman Catholic Gregorian chant in Spanish Florida and California; to the cries of lament and longings for freedom of African slaves; to the boisterous praise songs of camp meetings and revivals, Hebrew chant and now Hindu and Muslim and Buddhist sacred songs—Americans love to sing their prayers!
Today, mindful of this weekend’s celebration of our country, I want to look at four hymns as lenses to focus on some of the strands that have uniquely formed our spiritual lives as American Christians.
Processional: “The Spacious Firmament on High” Blue hymnal #409.
Not officially an “American” hymn. Joseph Addison was an English poet who never ventured across the Atlantic to the colonies. The poem itself, based on Psalm 19, was published in an English literary newspaper in 1712.
I chose it for this morning because it reveals an important strand of American spirituality in the English colonies and in the first years of kind United States. This strand—we still get this in New England—is a kind of “gentlemanly distance” from God.
Joseph Addison held a point of view very important to Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and other Founding Fathers.
They were “deists”—That means that they believed in God, yes, but not a personal God. In their minds, God was the “great clockmaker,” the creator who had set the world going, but then stepped back and let it work itself out according to laws of nature which were just being discovered by Isaac Newton and others.
This attitude was not un-religious nor un-spiritual. It expresses deep reverence and awe which comes from what one of my professor’s used to call “the size gap” between God and God’s world:
Let’s read aloud together the first verse. As you read the words, try and feel in your imagination the holy awe the writer felt toward the Creator of such a perfectly lawful and orderly uiniverse: . . . .
This “gentlemanly reserve” toward God was quite prevalent in colonial times and in the early days of the United States.
But the 19th century gave rise to two urgent and powerful movements towards a greater intimacy with God.
Gospel: “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” LEVAS 175
African slaves, pushed to desperation by captivity, cruelty, disruption of families, had nowhere or no one to turn to beside God. This was the God who had freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and that gave them hope.
But sometimes all they could do was lament: “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, Nobody knows but Jesus.”
There’s no size gap here, no, not at all-- no reverent distance,no philosophy or complicated theology—the slave is crying from his or her very bones to the only One who might possibly listen..
Offertory: “In the Garden” LEVAS 69
Meanwhile waves of religious fervor were burning through white communities in the United States during the 19th century in a series of what were called “Great Awakenings.” Women and men sang their hearts out at huge revivals.
The God of the revivals was not at all the distant and disinterested Clockmaker of the Revolutionary War period. On the contrary, God, especially in the person of Jesus, was vividly, emotionally present, saving them right there in the church or tent or open field, healing their bodies and forgiving their sins.
For many individuals the fervor of revivals eventually gave way to a quieter, but maybe even more intimate, sense of God or Jesus as a personal friend. These people felt perfectly comfortable talking with God and confidently asking for help..
“In the Garden,” written in 1912, expresses this radical sense of intimacy. Some of us may love this old hymn. And I suspect that others of us, it’s embarrassing, because it’s so off-the-charts sentimental.
And yet . . . , and yet . . . , isn’t there something gripping in the idea that you and I can walk, like Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection, with Jesus himself beside us? Anywhere? Any time? What if it’s really true that Jesus won’t put up any barriers between us.
I have just read a history of Alcoholics Anonymous which points out that this has been the favorite hymn of many recovered alcoholics over the years Why?. Because only such a sense of intimacy with Jesus/God/their “Higher Power” that allows alcoholics and other addicts to make the leap of faith and surrender their lives to a God who truly cares for them.
Let’s pray this hymn, saying verses one and two with the chorus, and while we’re speaking, imagine that we’re walking with Jesus in a July garden:
Recessional: “America the Beautiful” #719.
Written at the top of Pike’s Peak by a young woman professor from Wellesley College in 1893.
She’d just traveled west by train for the first time. She’s seen the “alabaster city” of Chicago all spruced up for the Columbian Exposition. She’d watched the “amber waves of grain” as the train crossed Kansas on the 4th of July.
On the top of Pike’s Peak, Katherine Lee Bates’s heart burst out in a prayer for her country. I love this hymn: it doesn’t express uncritical admiration nor a jingoistic thanksgiving for a perfect nation. Rather, Bates’ prays that her country’s physical beauty may be matched by moral and ethical beauty.
Each verse concludes with a prayer, one of which is repeated—“America! America! God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea,” and this, which deserves to be prayed before every deliberation of every governmental body in this nation: “America! America! God mend thine every flaw, confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.”
Friday, July 3, 2009
Fourth Sunday after Pentecost June 21, 2009
Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
June 21, 2009
It sounds like such a simple thing, the disciples’ saying “yes” to Jesus’ suggestion: “Let us go across to the other side.”
But it was a bigger, riskier “yes” than it appears. Jesus was raising the challenge level of his discipleship training.
First, as professional fishermen, the apostles knew their waterways and this was not an hospitable one. The Sea of Galilee is actually a large freshwater lake like Lake Winnepesaukee. It is shaped like a wind tunnel—12 ½ miles long and 4 to 7 miles wide—and it has a reputation for sudden wild storms which are more likely to kick up at night, just the time they were starting off.
And Jesus was leading them “to the other side,” out of their comfort zone in Jewish Galilee across to the seat of Roman territory. It’s as if Jesus was saying to them: “let’s go touch base with those vicious Roman occupiers who hate us.”
Now there’s nothing wrong with taking risks, is there?
Jesus could have been inviting his disciples on a first century equivalent of an Outward Bound program for guys who were new in the role of disciples.
It could have been a positive adventure out there on the lake, with Jesus like a good teacher instructing them, encouraging them, preparing them for what they’d find on the other side. It could have been an exercise in what people today call “team building.”
But it didn’t happen like that: instead their teacher fell asleep and the mother of all storms blew up.
At first they thought they could handle it themselves. After all, they were fishermen, accustomed to storms. Their teacher Jesus was a carpenter. What help could he possibly be to them anyway?
But the storm got out of control, way out of their control! They could hear the seams of the boat creaking, know from their past experience that they could only take one or two huge waves more before the whole thing was over and the sea sucked them all down into darkness.
Like the disciples, we cannot have a rich, productive, involved life without saying those big “yeses” to invitations that lead into an unknown future.
Some of us have said “yes” to marriage, some to an all-absorbing vocation, some to children . . . knowing that the “yes” carried risks, but confident that we could handle whatever came.
I know from my own experience what fun it is to take off on my own and steer my life straight ahead feeling the rush of my own power!
A little risk, a little challenge—great! I can handle it; I can manage; I’m in control.
When the sailing’s smooth, if I’m Christian, I know Christ is in there somewhere—but honestly, who needs him?
Until things start going very wrong.
It’s so easy to forget about the Christ who promised to abide in the very center of our being until the moment when we realize—O Lord, I’m drowning!, and then we echo the disciples’ cry, “Teacher, don’t you care that we are perishing?” Our cry might be: O Lord, don’t you care that my marriage isn’t working?; O Lord, don’t you care that our kid’s on drugs?; O Lord, don’t you care that the prognosis is unspeakably bad?; O Lord, don’t you care that my husband/wife/son/daughter/mother/father is back in Iraq? O Lord, don’t you care that we’ve worked and worked and worked for justice and nothing’s change?
In the Gospel story, what did Jesus do? He woke up and rebuked the wind, and ordered the sea, “Peace! Be still!” as if the Sea of Galilee was an unruly pet dog. And abruptly the storm stops.
But let’s be honest here. We all know that many times, no matter how hard we pray, marriages break apart, sons or daughters persist using drugs or alcohol, loved ones die.
Christ in our lives is not (usually) a magician. Christ doesn’t (usually) make things all ok. What Christ does, is be there. There right in the boat with us, he takes the rudder from our hands, he invites us to give up the big lie that we are in control of our lives.
Christ stays there with us, powerfully loving us through the most painful, destructive situations. And yes—and this is just about impossible to grasp when you’re in the boat and the waters of pain and loss are crashing over you—Christ does do deeds of power—he gives amazing, impossible gifts of patience and peace and growth and hope and love even in the midst of the tumult.
I see Christ’s loving and powerful presence at death beds. I see Christ’s loving and powerful presence in people wearing themselves out for the sake of others—in, for example, the Untouchable women I met in India who risked their lives every week by gathering clean water for their village from the upper caste wells instead of polluted water from their own.
I see Christ’s loving powerful presence at the Offenders’ Program; I see Christ’s loving powerful presence in your lives as you deal with vicious storms that spring up when you least expect them. Yes, we give up control, or rather, the illusion of control. But what we receive in return is the powerful presence of God.
******
A month or so ago, a woman came up to us at the WalMart table. She held back tears as she told us about a life-threatening illness in her family on top of a heartbreaking marital breakup.
As I groped for some way to respond, she paused, was silent, and then added, as if she were surprised by the realization: “You know, it’s so odd . . . I’ve never felt closer to God.”
June 21, 2009
It sounds like such a simple thing, the disciples’ saying “yes” to Jesus’ suggestion: “Let us go across to the other side.”
But it was a bigger, riskier “yes” than it appears. Jesus was raising the challenge level of his discipleship training.
First, as professional fishermen, the apostles knew their waterways and this was not an hospitable one. The Sea of Galilee is actually a large freshwater lake like Lake Winnepesaukee. It is shaped like a wind tunnel—12 ½ miles long and 4 to 7 miles wide—and it has a reputation for sudden wild storms which are more likely to kick up at night, just the time they were starting off.
And Jesus was leading them “to the other side,” out of their comfort zone in Jewish Galilee across to the seat of Roman territory. It’s as if Jesus was saying to them: “let’s go touch base with those vicious Roman occupiers who hate us.”
Now there’s nothing wrong with taking risks, is there?
Jesus could have been inviting his disciples on a first century equivalent of an Outward Bound program for guys who were new in the role of disciples.
It could have been a positive adventure out there on the lake, with Jesus like a good teacher instructing them, encouraging them, preparing them for what they’d find on the other side. It could have been an exercise in what people today call “team building.”
But it didn’t happen like that: instead their teacher fell asleep and the mother of all storms blew up.
At first they thought they could handle it themselves. After all, they were fishermen, accustomed to storms. Their teacher Jesus was a carpenter. What help could he possibly be to them anyway?
But the storm got out of control, way out of their control! They could hear the seams of the boat creaking, know from their past experience that they could only take one or two huge waves more before the whole thing was over and the sea sucked them all down into darkness.
Like the disciples, we cannot have a rich, productive, involved life without saying those big “yeses” to invitations that lead into an unknown future.
Some of us have said “yes” to marriage, some to an all-absorbing vocation, some to children . . . knowing that the “yes” carried risks, but confident that we could handle whatever came.
I know from my own experience what fun it is to take off on my own and steer my life straight ahead feeling the rush of my own power!
A little risk, a little challenge—great! I can handle it; I can manage; I’m in control.
When the sailing’s smooth, if I’m Christian, I know Christ is in there somewhere—but honestly, who needs him?
Until things start going very wrong.
It’s so easy to forget about the Christ who promised to abide in the very center of our being until the moment when we realize—O Lord, I’m drowning!, and then we echo the disciples’ cry, “Teacher, don’t you care that we are perishing?” Our cry might be: O Lord, don’t you care that my marriage isn’t working?; O Lord, don’t you care that our kid’s on drugs?; O Lord, don’t you care that the prognosis is unspeakably bad?; O Lord, don’t you care that my husband/wife/son/daughter/mother/father is back in Iraq? O Lord, don’t you care that we’ve worked and worked and worked for justice and nothing’s change?
In the Gospel story, what did Jesus do? He woke up and rebuked the wind, and ordered the sea, “Peace! Be still!” as if the Sea of Galilee was an unruly pet dog. And abruptly the storm stops.
But let’s be honest here. We all know that many times, no matter how hard we pray, marriages break apart, sons or daughters persist using drugs or alcohol, loved ones die.
Christ in our lives is not (usually) a magician. Christ doesn’t (usually) make things all ok. What Christ does, is be there. There right in the boat with us, he takes the rudder from our hands, he invites us to give up the big lie that we are in control of our lives.
Christ stays there with us, powerfully loving us through the most painful, destructive situations. And yes—and this is just about impossible to grasp when you’re in the boat and the waters of pain and loss are crashing over you—Christ does do deeds of power—he gives amazing, impossible gifts of patience and peace and growth and hope and love even in the midst of the tumult.
I see Christ’s loving and powerful presence at death beds. I see Christ’s loving and powerful presence in people wearing themselves out for the sake of others—in, for example, the Untouchable women I met in India who risked their lives every week by gathering clean water for their village from the upper caste wells instead of polluted water from their own.
I see Christ’s loving powerful presence at the Offenders’ Program; I see Christ’s loving powerful presence in your lives as you deal with vicious storms that spring up when you least expect them. Yes, we give up control, or rather, the illusion of control. But what we receive in return is the powerful presence of God.
******
A month or so ago, a woman came up to us at the WalMart table. She held back tears as she told us about a life-threatening illness in her family on top of a heartbreaking marital breakup.
As I groped for some way to respond, she paused, was silent, and then added, as if she were surprised by the realization: “You know, it’s so odd . . . I’ve never felt closer to God.”
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